Skip To Content
    This post has not been vetted or endorsed by BuzzFeed's editorial staff. BuzzFeed Community is a place where anyone can create a post or quiz. Try making your own!

    Want To Win Your Oscar Pool? Pick The First Option.

    What does the alphabet have to do with success at the Oscars? 12 Years A Slave might wish they asked this question before they chose that title.

    If 12 Years A Slave takes home tonight's Best Picture prize, it will have overcome a surprisingly steep statistical disadvantage. Sure, it has received widespread critical acclaim and is the favorite in pre-show predictions, but its uphill battle may result from something no critic seems to have considered: The first letter of its title.

    Turns out where a nominee falls alphabetically on the list is correlated with its probability of taking home the coveted golden statue. And 12 Years, which is treated by the Academy as beginning with a T, is listed eighth out of this year's nine nominees.

    Since The Oscars began, there have been an average of 5.9 nominees in the Best Picture category. This suggests that all else equal, the films in each position of the list of nominees should, on average, have a 16.9% chance of winning.

    Yet it turns out that those films listed first alphabetically have a pretty big leg up. These films have won 27.1% of all Best Picture awards over the Academy's 85 ceremonies.

    Worse news for 12 Years is that in the sixteen years in which at least eight films have been nominated for Best Picture, the one listed eighth alphabetically has won only once, or 6.3% of the time. Ones listed eighth or lower have won only 18.8% of these contests.

    Does this trend hold in other categories? It depends.

    Best Actor nominees with last names listed first alphabetically in their category have won 28.2% of the time, far more than the 20.4% that chance would predict (there have been 4.9 nominees in this category on average). The second-listed name also appears to do better than expected with a 24.7% probability of winning.

    The first two names in the Best Actress category seem to do better than all others on the list, but on average the first has performed about at chance while the second has done slightly better.

    So what does all this mean?

    Of course, correlation does not imply causation; there are countless factors that determine the winners and losers (not least of which is a film's quality). That means the producers of the next Transfomers movie probably shouldn't change the name to Alterers hoping their Oscar will arrive in two days with their Amazon Prime subscription. Plus, because only 85 years of data points exist, the significance of these results should be treated with some skepticism.

    But rather than filling out your Oscar ballot at random this year, you might just try choosing the first option in each category. And the Amy Adams's of the world might want to thank their lucky stars that their parents gave them such great initials.

    Sources:

    1. cnn.com/2014/02/27/showbiz/movies/oscars-2014-predicting-the-race/

    2. oscar.go.com/nominees

    3. awardsdatabase.oscars.org/

    4. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Picture

    5. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Actor

    6. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Actress